The A.V. Club's Scores

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For 10,443 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Badlands
Lowest review score: 0 A Life Less Ordinary
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,584 out of 10443
  2. Mixed: 3,746 out of 10443
  3. Negative: 1,113 out of 10443
10443 movie reviews
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  1. The White Countess
    As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    American Teacher
    The film is relentlessly one-sided enough to become tiring, but it's impossible not to feel for the main characters, who all love what they do while continually being forced to question how feasible it is.
  3. Lightyear
    What ultimately waters down Lightyear, an otherwise polished, gorgeous-looking entry into the Pixar oeuvre, is an absence of the excitement and disciplined storytelling spirit that made Toy Story such a pioneering hit.
  4. Overlord
    It’s reasonably good, creepy fun, provided you’re not troubled by fleeting, uncomfortable thoughts like “Hey, that screaming bloodthirsty mutant monster could theoretically be a reanimated Anne Frank.”
  5. Return to the Land of Wonders
    Pachachi doesn't integrate her interviews into any kind of comprehensive portrait of recent Iraq history. They're bunched together randomly, like a collection of vignettes.
  6. GOAT
    The actual sports stuff feels a little sweatier, with too much clamor for each animal teammate to really pop. But Goat still leaps over the worst pitfalls of big-studio kid-centric animation. Where it counts, the movie knows just enough ball.
  7. Good Boys
    Yet as with "Booksmart," the summer’s earlier riff on that Apatovian classic, there are times when Good Boys feels a little too nice to actually be uproarious. In more ways than one, it’s the training wheels for a better comedy — a slightly edgier and funnier one.
  8. In the Land of Saints and Sinners
    This is the definition of a B movie; competent, easy to follow, and almost instantly forgettable.
  9. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain would be better-served by more touches of universality, as in the scene where a neighbor woman comforts Huang by saying, "All women go through this." That scene flirts with metaphor. The rest of the film too often descends into harangue.
  10. Notorious
    Notorious suffers from biopic-itis, that regrettable tendency to reduce complicated lives to a greatest-hits assemblage of melodramatic highs and agonizing lows.
  11. Motherless Brooklyn
    This passion project also lets Norton indulge in the kind of tic-heavy acting challenge he embraced early in his career.
  12. The Whale
    The Whale’s raison d’etre seems to be about being the engine driving Fraser’s long-awaited resurgence. Beyond that there’s nothing much to see.
  13. Great Expectations
    In the end, a thoroughly needless rehash.
  14. Warm Bodies
    For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.
  15. Crawl
    If any one thing holds back this modest, skillfully made potboiler from true B-movie glory, it’s the human drama.
  16. With All Deliberate Speed
    At once inspirational and deeply depressing, With All Deliberate Speed, directed by "Hoop Dreams" producer Peter Gilbert, is too candid and forthright about the current state of race relations to allow for the sort of cheery, unambiguous uplift favored by civil-rights documentaries.
  17. Matthias & Maxime
    It’s curiously flat and dreary-looking ... There was a time when I used to wish that Dolan would settle down a little—the manic energy of his work could be exhausting. But if this is the alternative, I take it all back.
  18. McFarland USA
    Of course, it would be even nicer to see this story from a student athlete’s point of view. Beyond the representation issue, it might allow the movie to eliminate its dull and unevenly developed scenes.
  19. Bride Flight
    The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.
  20. Gloomy Sunday
    Gloomy Sunday's success in transcending its own clichés and conventionality -- at least until the morose finale -- is due in part to the story's primal romantic pull, aided by attractive actors who either stare longingly into each other's eyes or cavort in states of undress.
  21. Stillwater
    It’s the first time McCarthy has made such prickly use of his talent for summoning audience sympathy, allowing Bill’s regrets about his parental shortcomings to resonate through his every decision.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wedding Singer
    Sandler is endearing as a sensitive nice guy, and Barrymore is a cute love interest, but The Wedding Singer fails to deliver the anticipated laughs.
  23. P!nk: All I Know So Far
    If only the documentary following the start of her European tour were half as adventurous as the artist herself. Especially in light of the rollicking aerial pyrotechnics and vocal gymnastics provided by its subject, P!nk: All I Know So Far comes across as downright staid by comparison.
  24. The Nowhere Inn
    Never consistently funny enough to work as straight comedy and too broad to succeed in its somber aspirations, the results are still engaging in their attempts to defy easy categorization. Like St. Vincent herself, The Nowhere Inn keeps morphing into something else.
  25. A Perfect Day
    On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu—there haven’t been many films about foreign aid workers, and Farías clearly amassed a wealth of anecdotes during her time with DWB. Trouble is, it plays like a collection of anecdotes.
  26. Cool Runnings
    Though it certainly has faults, which only the extremely nostalgic could ignore, the film bests its contemporaries through its ability to unite childlike comedy and adult concerns without ever obscuring one with the other.
  27. Mr. Nice
    The result is a film that's long and choppy, with little narrative momentum. And yet at times, Mr. Nice is frustratingly close to brilliant.
  28. In Paris
    Besides the restless style, Dans Paris is remarkable for being more about familial bonds than French cinema tends to be.
  29. Christopher Robin
    Beneath its wistful tone, Christopher Robin supplies the purest wish-fulfillment fantasy that a children’s movie can offer adults: that our childhoods miss us as much as we miss them.
  30. Rooms for Tourists
    It'd be great if Rooms For Tourists had a clearer point, or something significant to say about the human condition, but even in spite of its low budget, cruddy look, and modest aspirations, the movie is art of a kind.
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